Monkey Unbound? Dambudzo Marechera, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Journey to the West

Journey to the West, a popular Chinese novel with its trickster Monkey as a central character, when partially adapted into the stories of The House of Hunger (1978) by the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, assumes some peculiarly post-colonial qualities. Marechera incorporates episodes and figures from Journey to the West in such a way as to present the alienated and disintegrated psyche of a Zimbabwean intellectual during the period of white rule. The socio-historical conditions implicit in Marechera's use of the Chinese text are made clearer by a comparison with the ways in which Maxine Hong Kingston, in her Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), uses the same text to articulate the bicultural voice of Chinese Americans. Finally, this comparison enables us to look anew at the problematic ”development” of Monkey in Journey to the West itself, a development which is evocative of the ”civilizing” of the wild.